SF and PH Based Job Seeker and Matching Platform Bright Acquired by Linkedin for $120 Million

Bright which has offices in San Francisco and Manila, and harbours some of the talents previously covered here on theBobbery as well with both Nikko Bautista of Taghuddle and Jolo Balbin of Readborg employed by the company. The US startup has 3 Filipino engineers in its San Francisco office, and the English team based in the Fort has 5 Filipino engineers in its crew. The company also has more than 40 Filipino call center agents.

Linkedin’s VP of Product Parker Barille announced that the platform considers Bright.com a perfect match as the service expands its userbase and functionality across the globe in this digital era and aims to connect all 3 billion online employees and employers.

At LinkedIn, we’ve invested a lot of time and energy into developing products like “Jobs You May Be Interested In” and LinkedIn Recruiter that use data to match members with the right opportunities and employers with the right prospects at scale. And that’s why Bright is such a great fit. Its incredibly talented team takes the same data-driven approach to connecting people and employers, and has built a powerful matching technology that will help accelerate our efforts on multiple fronts.

Ultimately though, our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce — all three billion of them. Doing so will require increasing the volume of job opportunities available on LinkedIn. As we add more job listings over the next several years, Bright’s powerful matching technology will be integral to ensuring that the prospects we suggest to employers and opportunities we surface for prospects are increasingly relevant.

The acquisition of Bright.com by Linkedin is Linkedin’s largest acquisition so far and may very well be one of the few which have an actual future at the company. Linkedin has previously acquired startups such as Cardmunch, founded by Bowei Gai, and Rapportive, which have experienced a quiet state of hibernation. Slideshare, which was acquired for $119mm last year and Pulse which was snatched up for $90mm have known little evolution since their acquisition by Linkedin.

But with the service always further growing, Bright’s matchmaking tech may very well become a strong and integral part of Linkedin’s core in the future. Bright.com raised $14 million in Series B funding from Toba Capital and Passport Capital in September 2013. The startup previously raised $6 million in funding in 2011.

About Author

Franky, a veteran online publisher, blog consultant, movie buff and internet entrepreneur since late '90s, is the founder of theBobbery. A digital nomad, having lived in the Philippines from 2010 to 2014 and now back in the UK, in he 2010 launched the largest recipe search engine online while running one of the major blogging and social media blog networks. He is also the co-founder of #failbeers.After a stint as Entrepreneur in Residence for Leo Burnett, he returned to the startup life and is preparing the launch of a startup in Africa in 2015.